Dead Man Talking by Roddy Doyle

Pat and Sarah are a normal, married couple who enjoy doing normal things. They have fish and chips for dinner, Pat pops to the pub for a pint and then they watch some TV. Today is different. Today Sarah gets a text to say that Joe is dead. Pat and Joe haven't spoken in 10 years. Sarah convinces Pat to go to the wake, and that's where Pat has a conversation with Joe.

First and foremost, I want to say how much I love the Quick Reads series. You can find some little gems sometimes but this really wasn't for me. Doyle tries so hard to convince the reader how normal Pat and Sarah's life is that it's just downright boring. There are points where the dialogue is really bland and uninteresting, but then he'll skip over what could have been a solid conversation.

The story begins saying that it didn't matter why Joe and Pat fell out, just that Pat ends up speaking to his dead best friend. The reader then has to wait until page 44 before Pat finally has this conversation with Joe. 44 pages might not seem much but there are only 99 pages in the whole book so for me there was a lot of dead weight writing.

At one point Pat describes saying something to another character, Sandra, but then says it didn't happen. He then does the exact same thing in the next paragraph. Once can be an interesting character development, as Pat obviously has things that he's too scared or worried to actually say, but doing it twice about the same thing was actually just really annoying and poorly thought out.

I expected a bit of a comedy when I started reading but it didn't make me laugh, and I don't even know what to say about the ending. What was a fairly lighthearted story about a man who loses his best friend soon turned into what I can only describe as a horror plot. It didn't fit for me. Some authors are able to cross genres in one book but this didn't work. It was just extremely strange.

Roddy Doyle has a large following and I don't know what his other books are like but this was not for me. I very much doubt that I will read anymore of his work.

Also available by Roddy Doyle is The Guts, released January 2015 by Random Penguin.